Allows you to customize web pages to make them more accessible for your needs.
Helpaccess is an easy to use browser extension for people with disabilities to turn every website they visit into a more accessible one, effortlessly. It allows users to personalize the way they use websites and overcome barriers they encounter online. It’s entirely free of charge, easy to use and just takes a few seconds to install.
A variety of features help people with vision loss and learning disabilities like dyslexia and ADHD. Zoom and color and contrast features help people with poor vision, while specialized fonts, rulers and highlighters help those with cognitive issues like dyslexia and ADHD. Several features like dark mode, reader mode, volume boost and change fonts are useful to virtually anyone.
Users can select from a choice of preset disability profiles to quickly enable a combination of features that suit their needs and transform websites to work better for them. People can also choose to enable an ‘always on’ toolbar that provides quick access to most used features for specific disability types.
I. Features for Everyone:
Helpaccess not only improves accessibility for people with disabilities but can also help people without disabilities enhance their browsing experience and increase productivity.
1. Reader mode
Reader mode helps you remove ads, backgrounds and other clutter on web pages that can cause distraction and lets you focus on the content. Particularly useful for people with dyslexia or other learning disabilities.
2. Dark Mode
Staring at bright screens through the day and before bed can cause considerable eye strain and also disrupt sleep patterns. Dark mode turns whites to blacks, making them much easier on the eyes, particularly in darker environments. It also helps reduce visual stress and symptoms like migraines for people with light sensitivity and related conditions like photophobia.
3. Volume boost
Increase volume to upto 600%. Useful for people who are short of hearing and also for audio or video that has low audibility even at maximum system volume.
4. Keyboard focus
Highlights links as users tab through the websites. Helps keyboard only users navigate clearly and know where they are on a web page. People with ADHD or dyslexia can also navigate easier and identify links and content quicker.
5. Bluelight Filter
Reduces screen brightness and protects the retina from blue light penetration. Enabling blue light filters, especially leading up to bedtime can greatly impact the quality of sleep. Like dark mode, it also helps reduce visual stress and symptoms like migraines for people with light sensitivity and related conditions like photophobia.
II. Magnification:
1. Screen Zoom
Enlarge and enhance everything or specific segments of your screen. Set different zoom level preferences just once for sites you visit often for a clear browsing experience every time.
2. Big Mouse cursor
Increase the size of your mouse cursor to make it more visible on screen. Choose between black or white for colors and a size that suits your needs.
3. Bigger Text
Enlarge text on web pages to be able to better read content. Increase font size upto ten times.
III. Change Colors
1. Monochrome
Monochrome mode is an accessibility feature that allows folks with a visual impairment, such as color blindness, to disable colors that make the display even harder for them to see. Lately, it’s also been known to help people regulate or reduce time spent online. By disabling colors, an otherwise colorful and rich experience becomes drab, discouraging people with web or social media addiction from spending excessive time online.
2. High contrast
For low contrast sensitivity, common in older people and colour blindness, using high contrast can help better identify diagrams, maps and other types of images, icons and buttons.
IV. Improve Readability:
1. Display Image Alt text
Image alt text helps not only screen readers but also people with cognitive issues that can benefit from text descriptions of images.
2. Dyslexia Font
Fonts like Opendyslexic can help people with dyslexia and other learning disabilities to comprehend the web better.
3. Change Font
Choose from around 10 fonts to give yourself a more pleasurable reading experience. Some fonts are easier on the eyes than others and can help you read more online and reduce eye strain.
4. Change Font Color
Change the color of all the text in websites to improve clarity or suit the eyes. Set universal preferences or different preferences for different sites based on their background colors.
5. Increase Letter Spacing
Being able to increase space between letters can help people with visual impairments or dyslexia comprehend words better.
6. Increase Word Spacing
The ability to put more space between words and lines lets people with dyslexia and ADHD read and understand better.
7. Increase Line Height
Increasing space between lines of text can help reduce congestion, increase legibility for people with low vision and reduce confusion for those with dyslexia.
V. Improve Focus
1. Highlight links
Links on web pages may not always be obvious, especially to people who have visual impairments like color blindness. Many websites do not emphasize links by anything more than color. Switching on ‘highlight links’ can help easily identify all links on a web page for easy navigation. People with ADHD or dyslexia can also navigate easier and identify links and content quicker.
2. Highlight Headings
Enable ‘highlight headings’ to place focus on all headings of websites you visit. Great for people with visual impairments or problems concentrating to quickly identify key content on web pages.
3. Readable text
Selecting ‘readable text’ standardizes fonts on all websites to a single simple style. One that’s easy to comprehend for everyone.
4. Disable Animations
Animation that usually comes up unexpectedly can be a distraction to people with ADHD. Stopping animation also helps dyslexics to focus better and can also help those with epilepsy avert seizures caused by flashy animation.
5. Line Focus
Knowing where you are on a page with long text not only helps people with dyslexia and low vision but also helps reduce visual stress by underlining text that’s being read so that you know your place on the screen.
6. Dyslexia ruler
The dyslexia ruler provides an overlay and focus on parts of the page being read or viewed. Increase or decrease its thickness and change overlay colors as you like.
7. Screen overlay
Use of coloured overlays while reading can mitigate a range of visual perceptual problems, often referred to as Meares-Irlen Syndrome, which is particularly prevalent in people with dyslexia.
What's to come
Helpaccess is constantly being improved so that everyone can enjoy a similar experience online. Upcoming features such as the Immersive Reader helps put focus on the content and elaborate on the meanings of words that it contains. Particularly useful to people with learning disabilities, it is also very handy for students and people who have english as a second language.
Extensive research on assistive technologies like screen readers have led us to begin building more cutting-edge tools into Helpaccess such as ‘Genie’, an unparalleled search tool to find and learn the over 300 shortcuts available in all major screen-readers, ‘SkipNav’, the ability to instantly go to areas of a webpage instead of having to ‘tab-through’ or use multiple shortcuts, and ‘AccessMore’ which lets users unlock parts of web pages that would otherwise not be navigable using keyboard. Other upcoming features include instant access to contact information and accessibility statements on websites, better keyboard navigation and much more.
Helpaccess is global and seeks to provide everyone with as equitable a web browsing experience as possible. The web has evolved much to become part of our daily lives and impacts us in ways never imagined before. We want everyone to be able to use the web as effectively and efficiently as possible so that they can contribute and progress. That’s why unlike other tools, Helpaccess provides all of its features free, for life.
Coming out in English, Arabic, Bangla, French, Gujarati, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Malayalam, Marathi, Spanish, Tamil and Telugu.